Facebook Prevails In Privacy Battle Over Tracking Via ‘Like’ Button

In the marketing industry it is becoming increasingly important to target your audience through personalized ads, and this requires having some information when it comes to your target audience. This information has often been garnered from data collected from social media platforms such as Facebook, all based on users activities while on the platform. However, some users feel like some modes of collecting this data has crossed the line and is an invasion of privacy.

For a while now Facebook has had a long running lawsuit after being accused of violating users privacy by tracking them on line through the like button. However the social media giant came out triumphant after U.S. District Court Judge Edward Davila in San Jose, California ruled on Friday that the users could not proceed with allegations that Facebook violated its privacy. The dismissal was with prejudice, which means that the plaintiff can’t attempt to revise their complaint and try again.

Facebook has faced privacy lawsuits dating all the way back to 2011 when a group of online consumers accused the media site of violating a host of federal and state laws, as well as its own privacy policy, by collecting data about their consumers through its social widget. The web users said Facebook gathered data about its users whenever they visited sites with a “Like” button, even when users were logged out of Facebook. In June, Davila dismissed the claims of wiretap with prejudice and also threw out claims that Facebook violated privacy policies. In October the users filed an amended complaint alleging that Facebook’s “Data Use Policy” implicitly promised that the company wouldn’t track users who were logged out.

But Davila wrote that the Facebook’s data use policy wasn’t published until September 2011, four months after it posted a different document — the “Statement of Rights and User Responsibilities,” which governs the relationship between Facebook and its users.

“The Data Use Policy plaintiffs cite and rely on did not exist until several months after Facebook published the most recent version of its SRR that Plaintiffs attach to their complaint,” Davila wrote.

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